Secrets And Lies

Tennessee Williams on a troubled marriage.

Cat’s cradle: Scarlett Johansson, as Margaret, in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

Illustration by Jeanne Detallante.

The Theatre Critics’ Hospital is a nice place to recover from the trauma that is Rob Ashford’s staging of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (at the Richard Rodgers). In this infirmary, pundits are wheeled around by nurses in lovely white uniforms and starched caps. There are plump beds, handsome doctors, and no actors. But rehabilitation can be slow, especially if, like me, you tend to replay the catastrophe over and over in your mind, wondering how it happened.

The fifty-three-year-old Ashford made his name on Broadway as a choreographer, working on such shows as “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (2002)—for which he won a Tony Award—and “Cry-Baby” (2008). In 2009, he switched gears to direct, at London’s intimate Donmar Warehouse, a celebrated production of Williams’s 1947 landmark play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” starring Rachel Weisz. I didn’t see that staging, but I was drawn by the high-low direction that Ashford’s career seemed to be taking, by his Rob Marshall-like interest in how quality rubs up against pasties and rouge. Watching his choreographic work, though, I noticed some not so entertaining tropes: Ashford had a tendency to present his female dancers as types—vamp, ditz, and so on—rather than as full-bodied characters. And that’s the two-dimensional view that undermines his direction of the twenty-eight-year-old Scarlett Johansson, as Margaret, the self-described “cat on a hot tin roof” in Williams’s careful and melodramatic depiction of the interior life of a woman who doesn’t spend much time thinking about her interior life, because she’s giving all she has to her survival.

It’s late summer on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta: a season of storms. The Pollitt family has gathered for the sixty-fifth birthday of its patriarch, Big Daddy (a too robust, not vulgar enough Ciarán Hinds), who has recently had a cancer scare. Big Mama (an irritatingly depthless Debra Monk) has just got some wonderful news: her husband doesn’t have cancer, after all; it’s just a little ol’ something called a spastic colon. But that’s a lie that the doctor tells Big Mama, to ease her mind. Her sons, Gooper (Michael Park) and Brick (Benjamin Walker), and Brick’s wife, Margaret, know that Big Daddy won’t live out the year; it’s time to name an heir to his vast property and fortune.

That’s the pulpy backstory. Yellow lights slowly go up onstage. The first sign of trouble is the set, by Christopher Oram. It’s a spectacle in itself, full of the kinds of detail that are meant to call attention to a designer’s “dramatic” eye. In the script for what Williams called his favorite of his plays, the author describes Margaret and Brick’s bed-sitting room, where the action takes place, this way:

It is along an upstairs gallery, which probably runs around the entire house; it has two pairs of very wide doors opening onto the gallery. . . . Perhaps the style of the room is not what you would expect in the home of the Delta’s biggest cotton-planter. It is Victorian with a touch of the Far East.

In Oram’s inflated interpretation, four sets of glass doors open onto the gallery, and those doors appear to be two or three stories high. The overwhelming architecture dwarfs the bed—which should dominate the set, given that it symbolizes the battlefield that is Margaret’s need and Brick’s resistance to that need.

We hear water running in the bathroom. Margaret enters from downstairs, where Big Daddy’s birthday supper is taking place:

MARGARET: One of those no-neck monsters hit me with a hot buttered biscuit so I have t’ change!

MARGARET: Because they’ve got no necks! Isn’t that a good enough reason? . . . Their fat little heads are set on their fat little bodies without a bit of connection. . . . I said to your charming sister-in-law, Mae, honey, couldn’t you feed those precious little things at a separate table with an oilcloth cover? . . . She made enormous eyes at me and said, “Ohhh, nooooooo! On Big Daddy’s birthday? Why, he would never forgive me!” Well, I want you to know, Big Daddy hadn’t been at the table two minutes with those five no-neck monsters slobbering and drooling over their food before he threw down his fork an’ shouted, “Fo’ God’s sake, Gooper, why don’t you put them pigs at a trough in th’ kitchen?”

And so begins one of the most wry speeches ever written about heterosexuality at war with itself. (Margaret and Brick have no children.) For the rest of the first act, as other family members drift into the couple’s bedroom to taunt them or look for comfort, Margaret keeps returning to her ideas about what sexuality is and what it should look like. Does Brick no longer want to make love to his wife because her strength is a turn-off, or is it because she’s a woman? Brick is slowly drinking himself to death out of a convenient grief: his best friend, Skipper, killed himself, and he blames Margaret, who seduced Skipper to try to get him away from Brick and save their marriage. Or was Margaret’s sleeping with Skipper the only way she could find to get close to her remote husband? Is she less of a woman because she’s childless? Margaret grew up poor, and depended on emotionally pinched relatives, until she married into the Pollitt family; she knows how other people respond to appearances. But she doesn’t romanticize her battered past. Her genius for survival precludes her taking a sentimental view of anything or anyone, even her fucked-up husband. And Brick is fucked up because, as Margaret says so aptly, he’s an “ass-aching Puritan.”

To distance myself from what I don’t like about “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”—there are no chinks in its hard perfection and, therefore, nothing to discover—I’ve always thought of the nearly three-hour-long piece as three one-act plays, linked by the themes of truth (embodied by Margaret), death (Big Daddy), and the lies that are necessary to make a life. But any ideas I had about the play’s structure were drowned out in this staging by Ashford’s directorial noise. Instead of exploring the layers of meaning in the script, Ashford presents a stereotype of Williams—all sorghum, chicory, and cornpone logic—while, at the same time, trying to upstage him. Both Ashford and Johansson seem convinced that the real story here is not Margaret’s attempt to win her marriage back but the deprivation she suffered in the past. Inexplicably, they try to convey that impoverishment with outmoded black American diction and a Thelma Ritter-like solidity. Johansson clumps around the stage like a craven old market woman, displaying none of the sinuous wiliness—that tough cat on a hot roof—that might have caught Brick’s eye in the first place.

My interest in Johansson stalled after the movie “Ghost World” (2001), where I was fascinated less by her slightly zonked quality than by her beautiful raspy voice, which reminded me of Truman Capote’s description of one of his characters’ “rough whispery warm voice very slightly vibrating her.” When, in 2010, Johansson won a Tony for her Broadway début—as Catherine, the object of impacted lust who precipitates the tragedy in Arthur Miller’s 1955 play, “A View from the Bridge”—you could have knocked me over with an Oscar. By then, Johanssson seemed to have ossified into some agent’s idea of “sexiness.” Her carnality isn’t complicated—it’s all there in her partly open mouth. She’s like a character the young Angie Dickinson might have played, but without Dickinson’s why-should-I-care affect and emotional danger.

Walker isn’t given a real chance to do anything, either. There’s nothing in his face. He doesn’t so much act as undress. When Brick turns away from his wife to put on his silk pajamas, we are given a long look at the actor’s rear end. I don’t think that’s what Williams had in mind when he described Brick as “ass-aching.” But Ashford wants to pull out all the stops when it comes to titillating the audience. During the show’s climactic second half—I’m not kidding—he has the household’s black servants moanin’ low as Brick tells his father the truth about his imminent mortality. Still, why should those supporting players be treated with any more dignity than the stars, whose asses Ashford hawks to the highest bidders—that is, to us, the audience, all those people in the dark, whom he wants, more than anything, to applaud and love him? ♦

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, has been a staff writer since 1994. He is the author of “White Girls.”

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